Abstract

Flashlamp excitation of the Ti:sapphire laser exhibits difficulty in efficient exctraction of Q-switched pulses. This is due to Ti:sap- phire's short excited state lifetime (3 μs), which can therefore not store all the energy which is available during a typical flashlamp excitation (10 gs). Previous work has shown that multiple Q-switched pulses can increase the overall efficiency, if this pulse format is usable. This result has led to the current experiments where two Q-switched laser pulses at different frequencies are extracted during a single flashlamp excitation.

© 1994 Optical Society of America